Delivering healthcare to the rural population in Thanjavur – Zeena Johar, CEO, SughaVazhvu

Zeena Johar is the founding member of SughaVazhvu Healthcare and IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health (ICTPH) working towards replicable service delivery networks at the interface of affordable healthcare technologies and innovative human resource solutions for inaccessible rural populations of India. We caught up with her at the Health 2.0 India conference.

Zeena Johar returned to India after obtaining her PhD in Molecular Diagnostics at ETH, Zurich, Switzerland in 2007. Zeena serves as the President at ICTPH and MD & CEO at SughaVazhvu Healthcare (SVHC). SVHC launched its first rural clinic in 2009, in Thanjavur (Rural Tamil Nadu, India), and now is a network of seven such rural clinics. SHVC has served over 50,000 patient visits and screened more than 3,000 adults for chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Zeena also spearheaded ICTPH’s academic alliance with School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania launching India’s first joint certificate Bridge Training Program for AYUSH practitioners as a skill building curriculum for evidence-based medicine. SughaVazhvu Healthcare is a part of the International Partnership in Innovative Healthcare Delivery (IPIHD) Network and the SEAD Incubator at Duke University. Zeena was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2013.

Academic Interests: Zeena is a member of Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) – National Council on Public Health and the Governing Board at Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB), Bangalore. Zeena co-taught the first off-campus course along with Prof. Ramesh Raghavan at Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis. Zeena led representations in multiple national and international forums, most notably Asia Healthcare Forum, Singapore (2009); ICOWHI, Philadelphia (2010); Role of Private Sector in Global Health, The Wharton School (2010); MIT-MISTI India Program (2010); Innovation in India’s Healthcare Sector, Wharton and Indian School of Business (2011).